“Well, sometimes I wonder about that, tell you true,” the gunslinger said. “If theyweretwo, I think now they must have been brothers. Maybe even twins. But did I ever see ’em together? No, I never did. This bad man... this Marten... he was a wizard. Like Merlin. Do they ken Merlin where you come from?”
“Merlin and Arthur and the knights of the Round Table,” Jake said dreamily.
The gunslinger felt a nasty jolt go through him. “Yes,” he said. “Arthur Eld, you say true, I say thank ya. I was very young...”
But the boy was asleep sitting up, his hands folded neatly in his lap.
“Jake.”
“Yar!”
The sound of this word from the boy’s mouth startled him badly, but the gunslinger wouldn’t let his voice show it. “When I snap my fingers, you’ll wake up. You’ll be rested and fresh. Do you kennit?”
“Yes.”
“Lie over, then.”
The gunslinger got makings from his poke and rolled a cigarette. There was something missing. He searched for it in his diligent, careful way and located it. The missing thing was his previous maddening sense of hurry, the feeling that he might be left behind at any time, that the trail would die out and he would be left with only a last fading footprint. All that was gone now, and the gunslinger was slowly becoming sure that the man in black wanted to be caught.’Ware the man who fakes a limp.
What would follow?
The question was too vague to catch his interest. Cuthbert would have found interest in it, lively interest (and probably a joke), but Cuthbert was as gone as the Horn o’ Deschain, and the gunslinger could only go forward in the way he knew.
He watched the boy as he smoked, and his mind turned back on Cuthbert, who had always laughed (to his death he had gone laughing), and Cort, who never laughed, and on Marten, who sometimes smiled—a thin, silent smile that had its own disquieting gleam... like an eye that slips open in the dark and discloses blood. And there had been the falcon, of course. The falcon was named David, after the legend of the boy with the sling. David, he was quite sure, knew nothing but the need for murder, rending, and terror. Like the gunslinger himself. David was no dilettante; he played the center of the court.
Except maybe at the end.
The gunslinger’s stomach seemed to rise painfully against his heart, but his face didn’t change. He watched the smoke of his cigarette rise into the hot desert air and disappear, and his mind went back.
VIII
The sky was white, perfectly white, the smell of rain strong in the air. The smell of hedges and growing green was sweet. It was deep spring, what some called New Earth.
David sat on Cuthbert’s arm, a small engine of destruction with bright golden eyes that glared outward at nothing. The rawhide leash attached to his jesses was looped carelessly about Bert’s arm.
Cort stood aside from the two boys, a silent figure in patched leather trousers and a green cotton shirt that had been cinched high with his old, wide infantry belt. The green of his shirt merged with the hedges and the rolling turf of the Back Courts, where the ladies had not yet begun to play at Points.
“Get ready,” Roland whispered to Cuthbert.
“We’re ready,” Cuthbert said confidently. “Aren’t we, Davey?”
They spoke the low speech, the language of both scullions and squires; the day when they would be allowed to use their own tongue in the presence of others was still far. “It’s a beautiful day for it. Can you smell the rain? It’s—”
Cort abruptly raised the trap in his hands and let the side fall open. The dove was out and up, trying for the sky in a quick, fluttering blast of its wings. Cuthbert pulled the leash, but he was slow; the hawk was already up and his takeoff was awkward. The hawk recovered with a brief twitch of its wings. It struck upward, trudging the air, gaining altitude over the dove, moving bullet-swift.
Cort walked over to where the boys stood, casually, and swung his huge and twisted fist at Cuthbert’s ear. The boy fell over without a sound, although his lips writhed back from his gums. A trickle of blood flowed slowly from his ear and onto the rich green grass.
“You were slow, maggot,” he said.
Cuthbert was struggling to his feet. “I cry your pardon, Cort. It’s just that I—”
Cort swung again, and Cuthbert fell over again. The blood flowed more swiftly now.
“Speak the High Speech,” he said softly. His voice was flat, with a slight, drunken rasp. “Speak your Act of Contrition in the speech of civilization for which better men than you will ever be have died, maggot.”
Cuthbert was getting up again. Tears stood brightly in his eyes, but his lips were pressed together in a tight line of hate which did not quiver.
“I grieve,” Cuthbert said in a voice of breathless control. “I have forgotten the face of my father, whose guns I hope someday to bear.”
